It was a little more than 13 years ago that BusinessWeek printed its now-infamous cover story about Apple (AAPL), then called Apple Computer, entitled “The Fall of an American Icon.” Beset with shrinking share and an uninspired product line, the very future of the company was increasingly in question. “Apple is rapidly becoming a minor player in the computer business” wrote BusinessWeek, predicting the company “may be swallowed up by Sun Microsystems (JAVA) or another rival.” (Meanwhile, earlier this year, Sun agreed to sell itself to Oracle (ORCL) for $7.4 billion dollars, a pittance compared to Apple’s market cap of $170 billion.)

Indeed, since that cover story, and the subsequent return of co-founder Steve Jobs, the company’s...